Côte d'Ivoire's shaky accord

A pact is signed

But the army rejects it

“WELL, I didn't exactly expect them to clap,” said Guillaume Soro, the 30-year-old political leader of the Patriotic Movement of Côte d'Ivoire, a rebel group. He was referring to four days of violent riots in Abidjan, the commercial capital, that erupted when he announced that two of his brother rebels were to take charge of the ministries of defence and the interior. Many government supporters think this a humiliating concession to a bunch of post-adolescent terrorists, and furiously reject the peace accord, signed in Paris on January 25th, of which it is apparently part.

Côte d'Ivoire, once West Africa's most stable and prosperous nation, has been split in two and roasted by civil war in the past four months. Only the interposition of French troops between rebels in the north and the regular army in the south stopped the country from disintegrating.

Some argue that, without the French blocking the way, the rebels would have captured Abidjan and toppled the government. But pro-government mobs do not see it that way. Convinced that France has bullied the president, Laurent Gbagbo, into surrendering too much power to the rebels, they have attacked French people and called, implausibly, for America to come to the regime's rescue.

In truth, the peace deal is Côte d'Ivoire's best hope of extricating itself from a war that could otherwise turn genocidal. Over the past decade, Ivorian politicians have inflamed ethnic and religious grievances to the point that the country could fall apart. Mr Gbagbo may be the elected president, but few outside his own ethnic group see him as legitimate. Fourteen out of 19 candidates were barred from standing at the poll he won in 2000. Many Ivorians have since been branded “foreign” and disfranchised. This is the root cause of the war, which pits mutinous soldiers from the northern, Muslim half of the country against southern Christians—with a tribal militia from the west confusing matters.

Mr Gbagbo knows he has lost control. “Let's face it,” he said, “I didn't win the war. If I had, I wouldn't be [at the peace negotiations] now”. So he seems prepared to become, in the improbable words of one analyst, “like the queen of England”, a weak head of state with a powerful prime minister. Under the terms of the pact, rebels and opposition parties are to be given a large share of power. Discriminatory nationality laws are to be revised, and fresh elections held. As a carrot, the European Union will give planeloads of aid to a government of national unity.

But there is a big problem. The army, which is to be temporarily disarmed and then re-integrated with the rebels to form a new, united force, refuses to accept the deal. Many officers believe that the French stopped them from crushing the rebels, and most bristle at the idea of young mutineers swanning into top government jobs, flashing the new Armani jackets that the war has bought them.